Friday 31 May 2002 20.09 EDT
First published on Friday 31 May 2002 20.09 EDT

· The suggestion that a publisher might pay Jimmy Greaves more than £300,000 for his memoirs would until recently have been greeted with astonishment. It is still fairly astonishing: Greaves has previous memoirs under his belt, has told the story of his battle with alcoholism many times, and is no longer aregular on television.

But Time Warner, which has agreed this advance with the ex-footballer for a book due next year, had to beat off competition from rival houses even after the bidding went past the £300,000 mark.

It is not alone in its enthusiasm for soccer memoirs: Penguin is also about to make a big fuss about publishing another World Cup winner, Gordon Banks. One reason for this hike in value may be the unexpected success of Sir Geoff Hurst's memoir, 1966 And All That, published last summer.

Hurst replaced Greaves in the England team that won the 1966 World Cup. Greaves's publishers will no doubt also have one eye on the success last autumn of George Best's Blessed, which was unaffected by his numerous forays into print, and the familiarity of the story of hisdrinking binges.

The combination of football and alcoholism proved a winner, too, for Tony Adams, whose Addicted was a bestseller in hardback and paperback. Time Warner needs to sell about 100,000 copies of Greaves's book in both hardback and paperback editions to make a healthy return on its investment.

· Generous as it is, Greaves's advance puts him some way below qualification for the champions' league.Two sporting titles that cost their publishers more than £1m are out this autumn: memoirs by Murray Walker (HarperCollins), the motormouth Formula 1 commentator, and by Roy Keane (Penguin), the Irish national spoilsport - or inspirational midfield supremo, according to taste.

Penguin will be wondering how its investment will be affected by the departure of Keane from the Republic of Ireland's World Cup squad. It is not true that all publicity is good publicity, as Hodder & Stoughton, which brought out Will Carling's autobiography just as the rugby player was being branded a love rat, can confirm.

Keane's status as a hero has taken a knock; on the other hand, his marketability has grown. If only his ghostwriter, EamonDunphy, can get him to hold back some of his thoughts for the book, Penguin will have a hot story to sell - a much better one than would have come out of Ireland's likely World Cup progress, even if he had played.

· As publishing has become more corporate, prestigious jobs for talented editors have become more rare. The fashionable step for the disillusioned has been to set up as a literary agent.

This week Peter Straus, editor in chief at Pan Macmillan, became one of the most prominent figures yet to make the move, announcing that he would join the Rogers, Coleridge & White agency in September. Two other corporate refugees have struck their first big agenting deals. John Saddler, who left Transworld (a division of the Bertelsmann-owned Random House) when the company axed his list, has found just theright kind of client: Kate Williams, a young Oxford postgraduate historian.

A publicity photograph reveals Williams to be, in publishing parlance, "promotable". Hutchinson (an imprint of Random House), no doubt calling to mind the similarly promotable Amanda Foreman (Georgiana) and Lucy Moore (The Thieves' Opera), has signed "a spectacular six-figure contract" with her - worth £350,000 for two books, according to rumour. Williams's debut, a biography of Emma Hamilton, is due in 2004. Neil Taylor published authors including Lawrence Norfolk, author of Lemprière's Dictionary. His first lucrative client is a less cerebral figure: Ronnie O'Sullivan, the former world champion snooker player. O'Sullivan, whose father is serving a life sentence for murder, is the first snooker player since Alex "Hurricane" Higgins to have the charisma that might produce a bestseller. Orion is his publisher.

· The flotation of HMV Media Group, parent of Waterstone's, got a dismal reception. But the achievement of Waterstone's in reaching the stock market at all was really a triumph. Two years ago, the largest specialist bookseller in Britain was losing turnover as well as goodwill. It was heavily indebted to restless backers, but could not find a satisfactory way of paying them off. Now it can quadruple its spending on the refurbishment of its stores. The City may be unimpressed, but the book industry, for which Waterstone's represents about 20% of UK sales, is hugely relieved.